SAN ANTONIO – With Tuesday marking the fifth annual Wrongful Conviction Day, Spurs coach Gregg Popovich paused to praise the work of the Innocence Project and the Innocence Network.

"One (wrongful conviction) is too many, and when you dig deep and you find out all of the reasons why some of these people were wrongfully convicted, it's just sickening," Popovich said after practice. "The injustices are so gross, it affects so many people. Not just the individual, but all the families that are involved with that."

Founded in 1992 by Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck at Cardozo School of Law, the Innocence Project exonerates the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and work to reform the criminal justice system to prevent further injustice.

The Innocence Network is an affiliation of organizations dedicated to providing pro bono legal and investigative services to those seeking to prove their innocence of crimes for which they have been convicted and working to redress the causes of wrongful convictions

In August, Popovich wrote a letter that the National Basketball Coaches Association ran on its website announcing that the NBCA's partnership with the Innocence Project would be expanding to include NBA Voices, which is the NBA's initiative to "promote inclusion, uplift voices and bridge divides in our communities."

"Each year, more and more people have been basically saved," Popovich said. "What it has also done has made the uproar loud enough that the judicial system, the penalty system itself, is going to get changed more and more because people are demanding more equity and more justice as far as sentencing is concerned."